Category Archives: Robots

Robot and robotics news and information – keep up with the latest engineering breakthroughs

Making Robots from Trash

Mr. Woo creates robots (in China) using trash – without any formal education. Cool engineering – who needs Lego Mindstorms? Not Woo.

Robots Renew Computer Science

Robots put the cool back in computer science (page deleted by CNN so I removed the link):

Georgia Tech, which has branded the robot the “new face of computing,” is hoping that the class can be a new national model to teach students computing. To Microsoft Corp., which is investing $1 million to jump-start the program at Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr, it’s investment in what could become its work force.

Outside groups have applauded the effort, too. “In fact, computing is a tool that can be used for virtually every application — from entertainment to medicine,” said Virginia Gold of the Association for Computing Machinery. “And the Scribbler helps show how pervasive computers are in everything.” The computing industry has a reason to be concerned about the future.

The number of new computer science majors has steadily declined since 2000, falling from close to 16,000 students to only 7,798 in fall 2006, according to the Computing Research Association. And the downward trend isn’t expected to reverse soon. The association says about 1 percent of incoming freshmen have indicated computer science as a probable major, a 70 percent drop from the rate in 2000.

Lego Autopilot First Flight

Chris Anderson continues his progress with the sub $1,000 autonomous flight vehicle (using lego mindstorms at the core). He has created a site to track the progress and provide information resources to others: DIY Drones. Very cool.

Lego autopilot first flight:

My kids and I actually had the first successful test flight of the sub-$1,000 UAV two weekends ago, but I haven’t had time to edit the video properly until now. The good news is that a) it didn’t crash, and b) it works. We tested stabilization, autonomous navigation (only using compass headings this time, although GPS is in the works), and the real-time video downlink. Everything worked well enough that we’re able to see what we have to improve, which is the definition of a successful test.
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The main aim of this project is to both make the world’s cheapest full-featured UAV and the first one designed to be within the reach of high school and below kids, as a platform for an aerial robotics contest. Like the Lego FIRST league, but in the air.

Lego Autopilot Project Update

An update to, The sub-$1,000 UAV Project from Chris Anderson – Lego Autopilot is Working!:

Our summer project is to create a sub-$1,000 UAV as a proof-of-concept for a drone competition for kids. This weekend we passed a major milestone with a successful ground test of the key elements. The video below shows the prototype working.

We’d initially intended to do all the autopilot functions in Lego, but the gyro programming turned out to be beyond our abilities. So we switched to a commercial stabilization unit to keep the plane level and just use the Lego Mindstorms for waypoint navigation.

Very cool.

Toyota iUnit

The Toyota iUnit personal transport. Time named it a Best Inventions 2005. I can’t find much new on the progress made since then.

The sub-$1,000 UAV Project

The sub-$1,000 UAV project by Chris Anderson:

This summer my project will be to come up with a set of resources and instructions that will allow regular non-engineer people (and kids) to put together a drone for less than $1,000 that has most if not all of the functionality of this $10,000 beauty. The DraganFlyer autonomous helicopter platform shown above starts at just $2,400, and these guys seem to have made good progress on the essentials of a $500 helicopter UAV

Very cool. Hopefully we can post an update on the progress.

Albatross is an open source unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) project (March 21st, 2007: “unfortunately this project has to be put on hold… We are seeking opportunities to combine our work to date with other ongoing UAV research and projects, before it becomes hopelessly obsolete”). Paparazzi is an open source project for an autopilot system.

Robo-Salamander

Robot Salamander

Novel salamander robot crawls its way up the evolutionary ladder:

A group of European researchers has developed a spinal cord model of the salamander and implemented it in a novel amphibious salamander-like robot. The robot changes its speed and gait in response to simple electrical signals, suggesting that the distributed neural system in the spinal cord holds the key to vertebrates’ complex locomotor capabilities.

In a paper appearing in the March 9, 2007 issue of the journal Science, scientists from the EPFL in Switzerland and the INSERM research center/University of Bordeaux in France introduce their robot, Salamandra Robotica. This four-legged yellow creature reveals a great deal about the evolution of vertebrate locomotion. It’s also a vivid demonstration that robots can be used to test and verify biological concepts, and that very often nature herself offers ideal solutions for robotics design.

The researchers used a numerical model of the salamander’s spinal cord to explore three fundamental issues related to this vertebrate’s movement: what were the changes in the spinal cord that made it possible to evolve from aquatic to terrestrial locomotion? How are the limb and axial movements coordinated? And how is a simple electrical signal from the brain stem translated by the spinal cord into a change in gait?

Asimo Robot: Running and Climbing Stairs

ASIMO Brings Engineering to Life at the Dream Factory:

The Dream Factory is an educational initiative organized by Honda of the UK Manufacturing Ltd (HUM) in association with The Science Museum to provide inspiration and a greater excitement about the subject of engineering. Aimed at Key Stage 3 students (ages 11-13 years), each workshop has been specifically designed to explain a basic engineering principle and show how this is then used in Honda’s leading edge technology. ASIMO joins Punk Science presenters from Discovery Channel’s Scientific Show and the HUM team to help inspire over 500 local school children.

Communication Emergence in Robots

Evolving Robotspeak by Carl Zimmer:

At first the robots just flashed their lights at random. But over time things changed. In the trials with relatives undergoing colony selection, twelve out of the twenty lines began to turn on the blue light when they reached the food. The light attracted the other robots, bringing them quickly to the food. The other eight lines evolved the opposite strategy. They turned blue when they hit the poison, and the other robots responded to the light by heading away.

Two separate communication systems had evolved, each benefiting the entire colony. By communicating, the robots also raised their score by 14%. Here’s a movie showing six of these chit-chatting robots finding a meal.

Related: The original paper, Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication in Robots (pdf) by Dario Floreano, Sara Mitri, Stephane Magnenat and Laurent Keller – more robot related posts

NSF Robotics Report

Cool NSF Robotics Report:

Today, NSF supports mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer scientists and other researchers as they develop future generations of intelligent robots. These engineers and computer scientists cooperate with biologists, neuroscientists and psychologists to exploit new knowledge in the study of the brain and behavior. NSF also supports education activities that use robots as a platform for studying mechanics, electronics, software and other topics.

Robots and Biology:

A research team at the University of Illinois led by Fred Delcomyn is one group that has developed a six-legged robot modeled after cockroaches, in this case the American cockroach Periplaneta americana. The researchers hope to mimic the insect’s extraordinary speed and agility by learning and applying the biological structure and principles in the robot’s design.

Insect flight, particularly the airborne maneuvers of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, has been the decade-long research pursuit of Michael Dickinson at Caltech. Dickinson has tethered flies to poles and mimicked them with robots to examine the mechanics of their muscles and the flight control behind the rapid rotation of their wings.